According to JohnM :
Too_Many_Tools wrote:

[ ... ]

Over the last few days I have been doing some serious web surfing and
Ebay is by far the worst offender.

In my case, I am not spending as much money on Ebay as I would if I
could browse faster.

[ ... ]

I've got a bunch of their stuff in my hosts file- ebayststic.com, that
sort of bull, and I've always had pretty fast loading pages. Watch what
loads and try putting some of the useless sounding stuff in hosts, see
if it helps.

If it does, be warned that it could suddenly *stop* working
whenever eBay moves their functions to new machines. When they make
such a change, the DNS is alerted, and names such as ebaystatic.com are
routed to a different machine with a different IP address, after which
they retire the old one.

But your machine will keep trying to reach the old IP address
after such a change, until you kill off the hosts entry and note what IP
address turns out to correspond to the new machine with the old name.

It is better to keep your hosts file clean of external systems
(though it can be used to kill off a lot of spam sources and such. I
tend to do that in the routing tables, instead of in the local hosts
file.

Enjoy,
DoN.

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